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A companion to "A Field Guide for Getting Lost" explores the ways that people construct lives from stories and connect to each other through empathy, narrative, and imagination, sharing anecdotes about historical figures and members of the author's own family.

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A companion to "A Field Guide for Getting Lost" explores the ways that people construct lives from stories and connect to each other through empathy, narrative, and imagination, sharing anecdotes about historical figures and members of the author's own family.

Buddhists believe that change is a given and suffering is the inevitable consequence of attachment and then asks what you are going to do about it. This is the premise of Solnit's beautiful crafted memoir about her mother's Alzheimer's, the loss of a friend, and her own journey with cancer. Sol... Read More &raquo

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Reading this felt like being dragged by the wrist by a manic friend into a day-long treasure hunt of sorts. It's a bit discordant, like Symphonie Fantastique-discordant. Solnit gives us a compilation of personal stories wrapped up like little truffles stuffed with luscious bits of natural history, art history, literature, philosophy, and the writing life. Solnit changes subjects often, seeming to introduce a totally new topic only to tie things together again later. But she doesn't just make connections between ideas and topics and draw out their common themes. No. She loops back constantly, building a kind of tapestry of stories. Over, under, under, over. There's the big picture, but it's one that's threaded on a loom of smaller stories.

She uses these stories to "tell" herself but manages to conceal herself, too, as if parrying or dodging our scrutiny when we get too close. This did get a little exasperating at times, especially when I was enjoying a particular track and then suddenly she switches. At times, these recursive loops feel overly defensive. But no matter. “People disappear into their stories all the time,” writes Solnit. And “we never tell the story whole."